Over the summer, I tried to read Barrack Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope. I abandoned the effort about two chapters in, frustrated by the book’s seeming conflation of stepping away from partisan thinking with an aggressive refusal to stake out strong positions based on a core philosophy or ideology. Sen. Obama, in his book and in his campaign, has confused the willingess to and necessity of breaking with party orthodoxy with a need to avoid ideology altogether.
It is why, though I liked some of what he has said as a candidate and viewed his youth as a plus, I just can’t see myself getting behind his candidacy during the primaries.
Paul Krugman, in today’s New York Times, offers the latest in what has been a long line of what I will call Obama triangulations that leave him sounding like the Clintons — a soulless politician, lacking a philosophical core.
Krugman raises questions not only about Obama’s flawed health care plan — universal coverage it is not — but about his defense of it and his attacks on his opponents:
Mr. Obama, then, is wrong on policy. Worse yet, the words he uses to defend his position make him sound like Rudy Giuliani inveighing against “socialized medicine”: he doesn’t want the government to “force” people to have insurance, to “penalize” people who don’t participate.
I recently castigated Mr. Obama for adopting right-wing talking points about a Social Security “crisis.” Now he’s echoing right-wing talking points on health care.
What seems to have happened is that Mr. Obama’s caution, his reluctance to stake out a clearly partisan position, led him to propose a relatively weak, incomplete health care plan. Although he declared, in his speech announcing the plan, that “my plan begins by covering every American,” it didn’t — and he shied away from doing what was necessary to make his claim true.
Now, in the effort to defend his plan’s weakness, he’s attacking his Democratic opponents from the right — and in so doing giving aid and comfort to the enemies of reform.
It is a troubling tendency that, I suspect, will haunt him thorughout this campaign and could result in the kind of flawed presidency — should he win the White House — that we witnessed during the Clinton years.
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Hank Kalet 